


Reading Habits

by nothingtoseehere (sisaat)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Kakashi's reading habits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 07:09:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5239139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisaat/pseuds/nothingtoseehere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kakashi has been reading books all of his life, but the kind of books has changed a lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reading Habits

**Author's Note:**

> This is my second Naruto Fanfic and it's my second fic about Kakashi's reading habits. I'm seeing a theme here.

Kakashi got his love of reading from his mother. She had shelves full of books and for as long as he could remember, they had fascinated him. He used to run his fingers along their spine, when he was too young to read them. He was three when he first pulled one off the shelf, brought it to his mother and demanded to be thought to read.

 

She loved stories full political intrigue and rich characters with complex motives and relationships. They were a lot for a three years old to try to absorb, no matter how smart he was, but she never tried telling him he was too young. He slowly worked his way through her impressive collection. She added books faster than he could read them.

 

Then one day, she didn't come back from a mission to Suna and, sooner or later Kakashi ran out of books to read. So he started to reread them. He was six years old and fighting a war and he had a different appreciation for those stories now.

 

* * *

 

The first books he bought himself were from the convenience store. He was eight years old and newly an orphan and his mother's books were all still at the Hatake compound where he'd rather not go. Kakashi had stopped front of several bookstores, often stopping to stare at the displays in the windows, but he always continued on his way. He was never comfortable walking in an unfamiliar store. But the convenience store had books too and he had to go there anyway, so he might as well pick up some reading material. They were romance novels, not at all what he was used to, and the novelty was exciting.

 

That evening he curled up on his bed with his brand new book burned through the pages. One eyebrow went up when the two protagonists met and fell deeply in a love that they swore was eternal within the span of a dozen pages. The second eyebrow joined it at the series of improbable obstacles to that love. He finished the book that same night, went to sleep, and bought a new one the next day.

 

Those stories didn't stay with him the way his mother's had. He didn't lie awake at night untangling the intricacies of the plot. He didn't connect deeply with the characters. He didn't feel any sense of loss once he reached the end. He didn't have sudden realizations about someone's hidden motives months later. He just read them, got invested in the story for an evening through a great deal of willing suspension of disbelief, then never thought of them again. With the world around him falling a little more apart every day, this wasn't a bad thing. The stories and characters were all rather similar so even opening a new book felt like coming back home.

 

They were lighter than his mother's books and they were _his_ , so he started to carry one around at all time for when he found himself with nothing to do, or needed to ignore someone. Obito yelled a lot when Kakashi wouldn't look up from the pages to check out his latest attempt at being a competent shinobi. Kakashi smiled underneath his mask.

 

* * *

 

He went back to the Hatake compound briefly, after Obito's death. He picked up a few of his favorites from his mother's collection while he was there.

 

* * *

 

After the war, he found a stall near his usual weapon shop that sold books published by retired veterans who chose to work through their trauma by pouring it all on the page. His readings grew a lot darker. Where the romance stories were so foreign to his own experience, those hit close to home. Maybe too close. They hurt, but he could never stop turning the pages.

 

* * *

 

Kakashi's copy of Icha Icha Paradise had been Rin's, first. Her father had brought him a box filled with a dozen books, shoved it in in Kakashi's hands without looking him in the eye, told him Rin had wanted him to have them if she died, and left without another word. It had been six months since Rin's death.

 

Rin's tastes were eclectic, but one thing all of her books had in common was a happy ending. Whether they were about long journeys of self-discovery or murder mysteries, they always ended on an uplifting note. He found the orange book among those. He had seen Rin reading it before, when he had dropped by her bedroom window unannounced to tell her they had a mission, but she had shoved it under her pillow when she saw him and claimed it was an anatomy textbook. He hadn't bought the lie then and he was even more dubious when saw that Jiraya-sama couldn't seem to call body-parts by their _names_. 

 

The first time Minato-sensei—yondaime-sama, he should call him—found him reading it, he  _squeaked_ and turned bright red and demanded to know  _what is that_ _thing_ _you're reading Kakashi_ as if he couldn't recognized his own teacher's work. Kakashi bluntly told him “porn” because the flustered stutter he got in answer was a lot better than the mix of sadness and grief and  _pity_ he would have gotten if he said “Rin's book”.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Kakashi worked up the courage to enter one of Konoha's bookstore after his attempt to send Pakkun to shop for him didn't turn so great—only one of them would let a dog in and the pug, it turned out, had questionable tastes. He would have said he felt like a  child in a candy story, but he hadn't been fond of candies even as a child (Minato would have said he was still a child, but Minato was dead). He bought as many books as he could carry.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Over the years, Kakashi stocked the shelves next to his bed  w it h all kinds of novels, but it was always Icha Icha Paradise that he carried around. For a few reasons, but the only one that he would acknowledge was that the reactions he got when he pulled it out in public were even more entertaining than reading itself. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was surprisingly fast to write. I got a bunch of other partially written Naruto fics that I'm going nowhere with.


End file.
